History welcomes Dr Wendy Slater

Dr Slater is joining the History team at the University of Gloucestershire as part-time lecturer in Russian and Soviet history for semester 1, replacing Prof. Melanie Ilic who will be on a research sabbatical.

I came to Russian history through a love of the Russian language and literature and an interest in Russian current affairs. After reading Russian at Cambridge, I went on to take an MA, ‘The Soviet Union since Stalin’, at the University of Manchester before returning to Cambridge for a PhD in Russian history and politics.

I’ve taught Russian history as a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then as lecturer in Contemporary Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. I regularly review books about Russia for the Times Literary Supplement, and I’m currently joint editor of The Annual Register: World Events series, for which I’ve written the chapter on Russia for a number of years.

I’ve published a major study of the narratives surrounding the death of the last tsar and his family, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II: Relics, Remains and the Romanovs (1997), and I’ve also written a number of articles with a broad focus on Russian nationalism in the late- and post-Soviet periods, the Orthodox Church in modern Russia, and Stalinism as a culture. My current project is a book about twentieth-century Russia that looks at the themes of tradition and modernity through the stories that more often feature as footnotes to mainstream history.